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Guiomar Rovira: In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem. Keep reading…

These cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks. Keep reading…

“Of course, the flipside is that Ethereum could potentially be taken over by big corporations, financial institutions, or even by the State, in an attempt to recreate the same economic system and political order that we have today – except that this time, it would be much more difficult to escape from that system. This could lead to the establishment of a totalitarian society that is (almost exclusively) regulated by self-enforcing contracts, which establish the rules that everyone must abide by, without any constitutional constraints.” Keep reading…

One of the most important evolutions of 15-M is undoubtedly the “Movimiento por la Democracia” (Movement for Democracy). It clearly targets the political arena without desiring to become a political party itself. Their “Charter for Democracy” is an inspiring, thorough text on what politics should be. It proposes a politics for the people: squarely grounded in environmental realities and social justice, based on the Commons, defended from corporate interests and neoliberal dictates. Keep reading…

“This is how the whole “new communalism,” from P2P talks to debates about the FLOK Society, including the new North American cooperativism, mutualism, or the movement of the ecological economy, represent the attempt to contribute non-universalist global solutions that are not based on imagined and abstract identities, but rather on real communities, through the development of community economies capable of sustaining well-being in a network…” Keep reading…

“The CIC’s objective is to generate a self-managed free society outside law, State control, and the rules of the capitalist market. In this sense, it’s a model for transition more than a model for society, wherein we progressively construct practices and take decisions that move us away from our starting point within the system, and towards the world we want to live in. In our view, what we’re doing is activism, an activism for the construction of alternatives to capitalism…” Keep reading…

“Resilience is at the same time the golden rule and the consequence of building community on a shared economy under a P2P architecture. It is our main virtue and the only thing that can guarantee survival even under increasing global decomposition…” Keep reading…

“To immunize ourselves from learned helplessness, the best thing is to have encountered neither success nor failure exclusively. Be conscious that there are things which we can control, and things which we cannot. As Epicurus remarked: “We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come…” Keep reading…

“Can commons-oriented peer production be applied to material production? Will activists and contributors to the commons always be forced to work within capitalist structures to subsist while investing their available free time in volunteer activities? How can we created socially-oriented companies without the start-up capital to fund them? KMO from the C-Realm Podcast, Michel Bauwens, Dmytri Kleiner and John Restakis tackle these questions, and arrive at a series of proposals combining new models of social co-ops with commons-oriented peer production and systems for collective financing. Keep reading…

“What then can we do when open, frontal confrontation is neither possible, nor the best of all options (because it’s useless, because it makes us feel despondent and crushes our voices, because it only leads to a trail of wounded, imprisoned protesters, etc.)? In other, infinitely harsher situations than ours, the people managed to come up with subtle, intelligent and imaginative strategies to bypass repressive situations and laws. Below we present 12 stories of actions that can inspire us today to disobey the new law with humor, beauty, mobility, and a bit of camouflage…” Keep reading…

“I think that it’s helpful to think of the society that we live in as not being either capitalist or communist, in essence, that it’s helpful to think that within our society we have many modes of production going on at the same time. We have capitalism. We have communism. We have all kinds of hybrid and alternative forms going on. But we have a lot of different kinds of social relations. So, what we need to do is think about that in a compositional way. We need to think about what kinds of ways of producing and sharing are already going on right now, that we could develop more broadly, and how can we move and make value flow from the more exploitive modes to the more liberating modes…” Keep reading…

“History is present, very present, inside Disney’s amusement park. More-or-less realistic set pieces are everywhere, evoking all sorts of periods and places: a Western town, a Hollywood neighborhood, a fairytale medieval castle looming over the main walkway, a Native American teepee village, a fantasy Arabian bazaar, etc. There’s plenty of history, but it’s all crafted from papier mâché; it’s history represented through a series of stereotypes. A timeless historical spectacle: history where time is replaced with an empty, indifferent space, unfolding an arbitrary succession of theme parks and sub-parks.” Keep reading…

“Me, I think that the Internet an unbeatable way to get to people who don’t have Internet. That’s the way it’s always being, from the origins of marketing and in two-step flow of communication theory, and that’s how it should be in guerrilla marketing. Fashion campaigns aren’t geared to influence boys and girls, but to influence boys and girls who influence boys and girls. Political marketing campaigns don’t seek to convince voters, but to convince voters who convince voters.” Keep reading...